timwiseman

Generally, the DMCA could limit a copyright holder's claims against a website for user generated content to the takedown notice. But the person who posted it can still be fully liable under copyright law. The DMCA does not provide protection for them.

I think it is very rarely possible to blame anyone for the suicide of another. Aaron's death was tragic, but it was not the prosecutor's fault.

With that said, if this event is something that causes society to carefully evaluate things like outdated computer crime laws and the prosecutorial tactics used in this country than that may be a good thing both for the country as a whole and for his memory.

"The law should be the same for everybody and should NOT be applied selectively."

It depends on how the selection is done. If a prosecutor declines to prosecute because the law breaker is of a particular race, rich, politically powerful, etc. then that is an abuse of discretion.

However, we want prosecutors to be selective when it comes to saying that someone might have been justified even if the law as written doesn't explicitly acknowledge the justification (or acknowledges it but as a factor for the judge to consider). Speeding and running red lights because you are impatient and reckless is a different matter than speeding and running a red light because your passenger is bleeding profusely.

We also need to give prosecutors some discretion just to manage the case load. Unless we are willing to spend a lot more on both prosecutors and the court systems, we want them to be able to say "I will focus my time and attention on this murderer even if it means letting that shoplifter go with an extremely favorable plea bargain or even unpunished."

Solving your own problems can be a great source of inspiration. But if your goal is get your project widely used, you need to make sure others share that problem.

Sometimes asking around about pain points in other peoples lives/businesses can also be very fruitful

A beautiful comment and I think you add a lot of good thoughts. I must respectfully disagree with one point though: "my job is not programming. My job is delivering value using programming.

Semantics."

I'm not sure. More than once I have gotten lost adding features no one wanted because the process of doing it interested me, or I spent hours optimizing a routine because I just knew it could be improved even when what my users wanted was a new feature and the performance was acceptable.

When time is limited, focus on adding value through programming, not programming for its own sake or because the problem is interesting.

I prefer to lean towards overcommenting, and I prefer that developers whose code I will have to work with later do the same.

But as you say, they need to be good comments, and comments that either describe intention or explain something in the language that might be rather obscure can be very useful.

It depends on what you mean. I am a law student now, and while my perspective may shift when I graduate, I have had some tangential involvement in projects that that help people, that is extremely rewarding.

Financially, the market as a whole looks less secure and perhaps less lucrative than it was in the past, but that matters less for people not driven mostly be finances and the compensation for some of those graduating ahead of me is not unlivable.

It seems there is a disagreement as to what constitutes depth. If you want a "Sandbox" then most old-school RPGs will feel very shallow. You have numerous choices, but exploration and interaction outside those choices is limited.

On the other hand, if you want control over the story, many sandbox style games will feel shallow. Batman: Arkham City gave you a great sandbox with tons of things to discover and the story was fantastic. But your control over the story was minimal, limited to pretty much whether to do a side mission or not. You had absolutely no choices that affected the core story at all. Infamous 2 was similar. You had a lot of area to explore and interesting side missions, but you had only about 3 real choices and they lead to only 2 endings. The story was deep, the sandbox was wide, but your control was minimal.

I think there are great games on both ends (and in the middle) of this spectrum, but "sandbox depth (or width)" is very different from "story control depth".

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is the courts would see a distinction.

Kickstarter goes out of its way to try to make sure people understand that it is not a preorder service, and many projects include a "risks" section specifically talking about how it could fail.

There would be a clear case for fraud if the people asking for contributions just took the cash and walked. But in the event of a good faith effort that failed, I think the court would find that the contract was probably upheld. The possibility of failure was always there and what was promised was the effort.

This is an insightful comparison, but its significant to know that it is not actually a preorder.

When you preorder you are entitled to demand the product or your money back, but with kickstarter if it fails after a good faith effort you probably have no recourse. With most preorders (not all, but most) the product is near completion when you put in the order, but with kickstarter that product is often little more than plans at the point of pledging. It is similar to a preorder, but the differences matter.

This is true to a degree, but there are ways you can use multiple tools mixed and matched.

For a simple example, I might write my prototype in Python. After profiling I might decide to rewrite a couple of inner loops in C (or Cython). I might tie it to SQL Server as a datastore and use T-SQL in the interface.

Entirely fix it? It can't. Limit it? Certainly.

When they have a law that seems on first reading to say what the employer says it does, then the employer can show it to the employee to gain credence and the law itself will confuse any employee who does a little research without going further.

More than that, the employer may not realize they are misrepresenting it when the law seems to say something. They may be misusing the law in good faith. Something that will happen less often with clearly written laws that are not heavily interpreted in the common law.

As always you bring great insight into this, but what your reply does not mention is that the average laymen knows none of this.

Having such a law on the books means that a boss, computer service provider, etc. could show a laymen this law, even let them look up the law themselves and then threaten to have someone prosecuted for things which may be proper (or at least not illegal). The person being threatened would be able to verify that the law was real and without having a lawyer to explain the full situation may feel they are in a very bad bargaining position for whatever demands the other side makes.

As the court said, "We shouldn't have to live at the mercy of the local prosecutor" but neither should people without lawyers have to live at the mercy of those who could use such a law to threaten prosecution for negotiating purposes.

I do not believe we want such a system even if it were possible.

Many things involve context (it is illegal to murder someone, but a killing in the context of self-defense is often not murder). Even where context is not explicitly recognized by the law, we want judgment and discretion to exist (speeding because you are drag racing is very different than speeding to a hospital with a bleeding passenger.)

I agree with your core points: Passwords are not enough for accounts that need to be secure.

But one thing that a lot of this glosses over is that different accounts need different levels of protection. I really want things like my bank account to offer stronger protection than a password. On the other hand for things like my hackernews account and my dragongoserver account they are probably plenty and its not worth additional inconvenience to have more.

It would be like saying your average bike chains are dead because they can be defeated by bolt cutters. Bike chains are plenty of protection for an average bicycle, but I want something more protecting a safe deposit box.

You make an excellent point, but when working in Python there are advantages to tying in to tools that are also written in Python. They will tend to be easier to integrate into your project than non-Python code[1] and more than that will generally be easier for you to extend or tweak[2] if you run into a case where you have to "look under the hoos" for some reason.[3]

[1] Python works well with other languages of course, and is often used as a "glue" between other components.

[2] This assumes that you know Python better than whatever language it was made in, but for many cases that will be true.

[3] I often like to look at libraries just to understand how they work, but that is different. There are often cases, especially where the tool uses some abstraction that can leak, where you need to look under the hood just to get things working.

Well said.

I make use of social networks to stay in touch with old friends and extended family that I would have difficulty staying in touch with otherwise. This is indeed shallow in comparison with my relationship with my immediate family or current close friends, but I value this shallow connection along with the deeper connections in my life.

I got my degree in math and learned to program mostly on my own (1 introductory CS class in highschool and another in college). The degree has served me well both in terms of having it on resumes and in terms of the skills that I developped studying math.

Google has historically both been reliant on fair use and the public domain and has defended such in court. I'm not saying they did it out of altruism, but substantial precedents that help solidify fair use come out of Google's activities in court.

I apologize if it wasn't clear: He could offer a percentage of profits to his employees/contract coders that work on making this in addition to their salaries/contract pay.

He could not offer financial returns to the kickstarter backers. That would definitely violate the terms of service (though I don't see a way it would be otherwise illegal, assuming no fraud or deliberate money laundering was involved.)

Same. I have many ideas for interesting products. These ideas are not of value in themselves and I'll happily hand most of them off for the asking (I would in fact back in kickstarter if anyone seems able to execute.)

Now, an idea + something else can be of value, but then it is beyond a mere idea. An idea which has been validated by market research to show its marketable and at least enough technical research to give a rough idea of development costs and production costs can be valuable, but then you have added a lot to it.

Even just an idea + a detailed plan for researching and then developping the idea can be valuable, but again that has at least added something.

I won't quite go so far as to say that a bare idea is worthless (absolutes often make me hesitate), but without something more it is worth very little.

I'd have been worried about any in which the project's owner and visionary isn't a coder himself

I'm of mixed feelings. As a programmer and DBA myself, I would certainly find it good for the project lead to at least have programming experience so they really understood the process.

But you can be "knee deep in the guts of the game" in more ways than programming. A competent writer, level designer, or graphics artist are as deep in a game as the programmers, just in different ways. I would be extremely hesitant to back anyone who was just a "visionary" or "idea man", but I would happily support someone who had created a detailed script, level designs, and a thorough project organization plan and now needed programmers to turn that highly detailed set of requirements into code.

You have a point, but remember that he had substantial work on the game finished before he turned to kickstarter, so he wasn't trying to make a whole game on $28K.

Also, unless somehow agreed otherwise the creators still keep copyright in things funded through kickstarter, so he could promise perecentage of future returns along with immediate payment (it's not clear from the article that he did, but he certainly could have.)

I see Masklinn's point, but I also agree with you.

Fundamentally, kickstarter is much like patronage. You may wind up getting something fantastic by backing, but you are taking on a high level of risk of getting either nothing or something very bad. All backers need to understand this, and the only obligation (morally, I'm not even sure this could be enforced legally) is to put in a good faith effort.

With that said, I'm also comfortable saying that someone who is going beyond their obligations to make things as right as they can is doing the right thing. This is the right thing in terms of his reputation, in terms of people backing him the next time he uses kickstarter, and it is morally right in the sense that it is a good beyond what he had to do.

Not every decision has a moral component. Deciding whether to have cucumbers in my salad today at lunch does not have a moral components (its mostly about how fresh they look that day.)

Here, I see how you could say they made a moral decision. But in this case they made one moral decision of essentially "We allow all legal speech here". After they made that call, there is no further moral decision in keeping any particular, (legal) thread alive.

Had they decided "We will exercise some editorial discretion beyond just what is needed to comply with the law" then every single thread becomes a moral decision.

If you want to be precise, reddit has made the single moral decision that they will permit (legal) free-speech and beyond that point they have chosen to be amoral.

I agree with your basic point, but for clarity we as a society hand a fair bit of discretion to cops and even more to prosecutors and judges. In at least some instances we want them to make moral judgements, so long as thos moral judgements are within and guided by the law.

This is especially true in sentencing. For a minor traffic violation, a cop has discretion to say "You were speeding, but you have a totally clean record and it wasn't much, this time you get a warning." Most people want them to be able to do that and it is a mostly moral judgement. A prosecutor can say, "You met all the technical definitions of the crime, but you had extenuating circumstances. I decline to prosecute." Sometimes that is based on either law (the extenuating circumstance, like self defense, is explicitly recognized), or the evidence (its a close call whether they could win and they have "bigger fish to fry"), but sometimes its a straight moral call. Often we want them to be able to make that moral call.

With judges it depends on the jurisdiction, but they often have enormous discretion once it comes to sentencing. In many jurisdictions, the legislature hands out some guidelines, but just guidelines. The same crime might get many years in prison or probation, depending on the judge's moral decision about whether that instance of the crime was heinous or more excusable and whether the judge thinks that person is a career criminal or someone who gave into temptation once.

They must follow the law, but within the law we as a society explicitly hand out a lot of discretion at different points and we expect part of that discretion to be used to make moral calls within the framework of the law.

I like this point. In one company I was told a couple of times that things I suggested couldn't be done. I got a raise by going off and making a proof of concept that it could be done.

With that said, identifying challenges that need to be overcome ahead of time can be a useful step in planning as long as its not always seen as a reason to do a full stop on thinking about the concept.

You make great points, and I agree with everything except: systematically eliminate your weak spots.

Sometimes that is what you need to do. But sometimes you are better off further enhancing your strengths to real excellence rather than bringing up your weaknesses to an acceptable level.

Sometimes you can really sell your strengths, the things that make you stand out, and then work around the weaknesses by focusing on projects where they don't matter or by hiring an assistant/partner that can handle the areas you are weak in.

Additionally, suing a site designed to help teachers and run by a former teacher might generate some rather bad publicity.

I hope not. My life is filled with regrets. I have done many things wrong that I wish I could undo, and missed many opportunities that I wish I could take advantage of.

And it is often only in hindsight that I can tell the difference. Often, because I reflected on it, I learned something from my mistakes, but regret came with that learning. I suspect that for most people the only way to avoid regret is to avoid reflecting on life.